Tech Puts a Price on Street Parking

The Sweetch team on the streets. Right now the app is only available in the Mission.

By Lydia Chávez

It’s said that the best things in life are free, or nearly so—love, music (thanks, Spotify!), the stars. And street parking?

That’s currently up for debate, thanks to new apps including one by two young entrepreneurs who are seeking to monetize San Francisco’s street parking with a month-old app, Sweetch. It allows users to earn $5 by texting other users about the hard-won parking space they’re about to vacate. The driver who takes the space, pays $5. Whether Sweetch – and other parking apps such as MonkeyParking – can steer drivers in their direction, however, is an open question.

Sweetch (a reference to that sweet spot of switching out) is the brainchild of Thomas Cottin, age 24, and Aboud Jardaneh, age 29. Before they launched their app, they say they scrupulously researched the demand for street parking, looked into city data on parking lots and meters, and stood on the street for four to five hours a day to get a grasp of parking in San Francisco.

Were drivers willing to alert others for free that their spot would soon be available? No. Would they do so for a fee? Maybe. For most of the drivers surveyed, $5 seemed to be the tipping point—the sweet spot of someone’s willingness to text on an app that their spot would soon be vacant.

But not even six months of research prepared Sweetch’s founders for their collision with one of the city’s most emotional issues. When Cottin recently asked his fellow neighbors on the Nextdoor forum whether they would be willing to test Sweetch, his neighbors responded quickly. READ WHAT HAPPENED